Yes, Yes, I'm Still Alive

But don't worry. As long as I know how to love, I know I'm still alive. I have all my life to live, why I - okay, forget it.

I'm making this post standing out in the rather chilly weather wearing only a T-shirt and my exercise shorts (and soggy shoes) with my computer on top of a newspaper dispenser, for a series of rather excellent reasons which I will elaborate upon in due time. But first.

Yes, I didn't update for a month. But for three weeks of that month, I was home, where 90% of my reader base lives! They sort of knew what was going on. Lots of fuss over my sister's baby, lots of games of Smash and Left 4 Dead, all that sort of thing. To those who may be following the exploits of this blog over the Internet...sorry, but I honestly don't know if you exist or not. It's tough to write to an audience that you may or may not believe in. It's like an agnostic praying to God...he's not entirely sure if he's just making a fool of himself to no effect.

So. Couple of big things happened recently, notably among those being that - Oh, bugger this, I don't care that I'm going to get all wet, I have to find a seat. This standing position is irritating the bejeezus out of me. Stand by.

*moves*

...Why did I go to all that trouble? It's not as if I'm updating in real-time. Oh, well. This is supposed to be a sort of stream-of-consciousness endeavor anyway.

Anyway. Notably among those being that my university's football team, the Gators, won the national championship 24-14. Go us. Woot. I went to see the game at the O'Connell Center, the big basketball stadium, wherein they had the game playing on a bunch of big-screens strategically arranged around the place. It was tense stuff for the first three-quarters of the game - at the end of the first half, the score was 7-7, and this from two teams who regularly scored over twenty or thirty points in the first quarter. On two separate occasions, the Gator defense stopped the opposing team from scoring at the 1-yard line. That's hot. That's hot like fire.

Afterwards, me and the big group of friends I had gone to the stadium with went out to University Avenue, where more or less the entire student population of Gainesville had turned out to celebrate. In classic form, the streets were one giant mosh pit, and we were forced to hold hands or link arms to stay together. People were throwing rolls of toilet paper (good stuff! Two-ply! Cushioned! Why waste it when there's an inexhaustible supply of cardboard-quality crud from the dorms, I ask you?) and a few brave souls were lighting fireworks. There were the usual people dancing on awnings, a handful of idiots trying to climb the light poles (which the Gainesville police had thoughtfully greased to prevent this, see how well that turned out), and the big crossing where all the restaurants were was the fullest I've ever seen it.

It took us twenty damn minutes to cross the street. And we were lucky. Well, most of us were lucky. My part in the human chain was unfortunately broken when an avalanche of people decided to smash through the chain, just behind me. I lost my link with John, because to be frank, it was him or my arm, and my arm couldn't very well call me an hour later or meet me in the morning if I lost it.

It was very dramatic, though. I stretched out my hand, movie style, and cried out "JOHHHHHNNN!!!" He similarly extended his arm and bellowed "LUUUUUKE!" But then the crowd swallowed him.
"I lost John!" I yelled to Steve, who was ahead of me.
"Shit!" he growled. "We can't stop. We have to keep moving!"
"But John's still back there!" I roared.
"We don't have the time! He's gone, leave him!" Steve snapped. "If we try to get him, we'll be lost too! Now move!"

With a heavy heart, I continued. We finally made it through the scrum (or maybe it was a fracas?), whereupon several of us tried to call John (and Rachel, who was behind him when we were separated), to obviously no avail. I mean, hearing one's cell phone in the middle of that mob? Not a chance. Disconsolate at losing some of our group (and quite unfairly blaming me, what was I supposed to do? Use my Go-Go-Gadget-Arms to haul him in?), we made our way through the back streets of Gainesville, until he called us fifteen minutes later and said he'd meet us at the Krispy Kreme. Which he did.

Then we split three boxes of donuts. Since there were twelve of us, it worked out rather well. Most of us went home after, a few of us splintered off and came back to my apartment so we could beat up my roommate Zack, who had preferred to stay indoors and play World of WarCraft instead. (Mental note: Though this is mean to say, it's true - whenever I need an impetus to get off my arse and get out and meet new people, I imagine ending up like Zack, and I get in gear. He seems to be okay with being antisocial, though, so whatever.) We didn't actually beat him up, but we gave him a stern talking-to.

Oh yes, that reminds me. I had tried to convince him to come with us, using the only terms I thought reasonable:

"Zack, think of it this way. Think of it like...like the student body is a faction, and you need to grind reputation with them by doing a bunch of quests. Now, you may not like these quests, they may be onerous and difficult to handle, but you stick with them because there are some absolutely awesome rewards waiting as soon as you're the right rep level. Sure, grinding rep sucks, but think of what awaits you."

He didn't go for it. Too bad, his loss. I did the best I could.

That was Thursday...not much happened of note Friday or Saturday, Saturday was mostly spent making up a character for this BESM campaign my friend David is running. BESM is another RPG like Vampire, anime-styled, BESM standing for Big Eyes, Small Mouth, in the traditional anime drawing style. Our party consists of:

The silent assassin who can use illusions, invisibility, and mind-control to strike unseen and kill opponents before they even know she's there.
The angel who can call down holy fire and heal the wounds of others, in addition to having totally awesome wings and a force-shield.
The buffing specialist who has no powers of his own, but can elevate the powers of others to absurd levels. Absurd even for anime. Imagine.
The telekinetic whose misanthropy was upgraded by years of horrible genetic splicing, magical injection, and experimentation mixed with torture into full-blown genocidal mania, who wants to see every person in the world dead including himself. But his powers won't let him kill himself, so he kills everyone else instead.
The 99-year-old man who doesn't have that many actual powers, but has an unbelievable amount of knowledge in the oddest subjects (Knowledge - Region - North Mexico, Sculpting, Mechanical Engineering, all that sort of thing), and who is ageless.

Which of these characters do you think is mine? I'll mention at the end, so stay on tenterhooks (unless of course you just want to skip to the end and see, you horrible person you). Oh, and I've been known to play female characters, so don't immediately discount the assassin.

Anyway...boring stuff aside, oh yeah, Friday I went and got some blood sucked out of my body, and then put back in, minus my plasma. Gruesome stuff, but I got twenty-five bucks, and I'll go back tomorrow (Monday) for forty-five more. So, good news there. I need some extra spending cash, and this is the most convenient way to do it that doesn't involve actually (gasp!) working.

...I can hear bats above me. Makes sense, given the enormous bathouse that's not far from where I am. Oh, right, you probably wanted to hear the story about why I'm here and dressed like this. Well.

Today sucked. Absolutely horrible. It was gray, clouding, and rainy all day, and nobody was available to do anything, so I mostly sat inside, cooked meals, and messed about on the Internet. When I had to go out to pick up an ingredient for dinner, the rain, which had been a gentle mist for three hours at that point, suddenly upgraded into a fierce downpour which soaked me over and back. This rendered my last pair of clean pants soaked. So now I have to do laundry. Tonight. *sigh* (Hey, a whole paragraph without using parentheses. ...Poop.)

As to compound things, our Internet connection failed earlier this evening. It was actually kind of amusing - all three of us (me, Mike, Zack) came wandering out of our rooms, complaining about the Internet, sort of confused and sad that our primary form of entertainment was gone...bumping into walls, bursting into tears, falling down stairs, losing ourselves in apathy and despair. Well, maybe not, but we did all stand around in the hallway like dopes for a few minutes, trying to grasp the enormity of the situation.

It was about half an hour ago, maybe forty-five minutes, that I realized I had set a skill to train in EVE Online (the new online game I'm into), and that EVE has this annoying thing about skill training not doing the logical thing and proceeding to the next level of training once one level is done training. Since high-level skills take days or even weeks to train in EVE, I didn't want to waste the whole evening or more not training, so I grabbed the laptop and the only pair of below-the-waist clothing I owned that was still clean and trudged out to campus, where I could access the wireless network.

Which is how I'm posting. Aren't you glad to hear the end of that story? If I go back and the Internet is still down, I'll...probably go to sleep, I have class in the morning, but I'll be very put out. I hope it's back up by tomorrow afternoon. Like...really.

Oh, I'm the telekinetic character. I would mention this later, but I put it here just in case anyone actually did skip to the end to see which character I am. And stop staring, it's good for the blood to play an absolute psychopath every so often. Besides, his general lack of caring towards his personal well-being being what it is, he'll probably get himself killed before he can inflict too much damage.

Ugh. I gained back all the weight I lost when I was on the gym and running kick I was on that one time. I need to start doing that again. That probably means I won't be able to sell plasma...can't drain all the blood from my body and then go running three miles that evening. Le sigh. I'll at least do it for these first couple of weeks so I get the lucrative startup pay. I did recall that I should be calling Jamie and asking him if he knew someone at the hospital who knew where there were sperm banks in Gainesville...? I can do THAT and go running, by cracky.

Right. Now that I've put that image in y'all's heads, it's time for me to head back to my apartment. Night. I promise to update more often.










You DID just skip to the end, didn't you. Is finding out which character I'm playing so important that you don't want to read anything else I've written? Or is it all that boring? Well, I'm not saying. Go through and actually read the damn post. It'll be good for you.